Freedom for man convicted on discredited evidence

January 30, 2009

Prosecutors in Milwaukee on Friday vacated the conviction of a man who has spent nearly a quarter-century in prison for a murder that was solved using a controversial and now widely discredited forensic discipline.

Robert Stinson, who has always insisted he was innocent, is expected to walk out of a Wisconsin prison after Milwaukee County prosecutors told a judge they would not oppose Stinson's request for a new trial. He is being released on a signature bond while prosecutors take six months to determine if they will retry him.

"I'm quite confident that they won't charge him," said his lawyer, Byron Lichstein of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. "All of the evidence points away from his involvement."

DNA tests done over the past few years had undermined Stinson's 1985 conviction.

Stinson, 44, was sentenced to life in prison for the 1984 murder of Ione Cychosz, 63, who was beaten to death and bitten eight times. Her nude body was found in a yard near Stinson's home.

At trial, prosecutors used comparisons of the bite marks on Cychosz to Stinson's teeth to connect him to the crime in what was the first use of bite-mark comparison in Wisconsin. Two forensic dentists said their comparisons showed a match.

Since then, bite mark comparison has come under withering scrutiny. A 2004 Tribune series, "Forensics Under the Microscope," showed that DNA tests have proved wrong many of the leading bite-mark experts, including a number of the discipline's founding fathers. Critics say bite-mark evidence should not be used to link a suspect to a crime; instead, they say that it should be used in limited cases, and then only to exclude potential suspects. The Tribune examined the Stinson case last year.